Slow Horses

It's not the book's fault! It's an award-winning debut to a series based on the fantastic premise of Slough House, where disgraced, problematic, or washed up MI5 agents go to toil out the rest of their days. And clearly there was enough there to warrant a fantastic series on AppleTV.

But therein lies the problem. I watched the first season based on this book, starring an outlandishly flatulent Gary Oldman, first and THEN read the book. It's not a matter of the show being better than the book, it's just they are both exactly the same. It was like I was reading the script for the season - the book adds nothing to the experience. There's no missed backstory, no character interiority that's examined, no literary flourishes that would be impossible to render onscreen. Apart from a slight divergence at the ending (which I thought the show did better anyways) the two are one and the same.

So it gets knocked a star for a lacklustre reading experience, unique to me. Read on its own, prior to seeing the show, I imagine it would fare a lot better.